A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(104)

She was exhausted from the days and nights of stalking and hiding, and the long drive to New Hampshire. It was late. After a time the slow, rhythmic sound of Chelsea’s breathing put Jane to sleep. She slept peacefully in an empty place, without sight or sound or thought.

“Jane.” It was a whisper, but it wasn’t Chelsea’s voice, Mattie’s, or Jimmy’s. “Jane!” This time she thought she recognized it. In her dream she pulled aside the covers and got up, then put on her clothes. “Jane,” the whisper came again.

Jane opened the bedroom door, walked silently past Jimmy where he lay on the couch, out the front door, and closed the door behind her. There he was. She said, “Hi, Harry. I see I’m dreaming.”

Harry stood in the shadow a few feet from her at the corner of the porch, leaning against the redbrick wall. “Of course you’re dreaming.”

Harry Kemple was the runner she had lost. He was the only one who had been found by his pursuer and killed, and his death had been Jane’s fault. Harry died about ten years ago, and he had visited her in her sleep many times since then. Harry was still wearing the bad gray-green sport coat he wore the first time she’d met him. He had made his living running a floating poker game, and the coat with elbows worn from leaning on a table and the pants with the seat shiny from sitting through the endless games were his work clothes. He had come to her in a hurry from Chicago.

Harry was alive only because at the moment when the shooters had burst in on his game and shot all of the men at the table, he had been in the bathroom. He had heard the gunshots and then the silence, opened the door a crack, and seen them. When they were gone he had come to Jane. She had taken him to the stationery store in Vancouver where Lewis Feng, a highly skilled forger, was selling identities to Chinese nationals who had fled to Canada. Feng had made a new identity for Harry. Years later, Jane had taken John Felker, another runner who needed a new identity, to see Lewis Feng. She had not known that Feng kept a written record of the identities he had sold, and that Harry’s new name and address were on the list.

Within a day Feng had been tortured and killed. A day after that, John Felker had found his way to Santa Barbara, California, and cut Harry’s throat. Whenever Jane saw Harry in her dreams, it was with his throat cut, and sewn back together by the undertaker or the coroner with a stitch that looked like the stitching on a baseball.

“Janie,” he said. “You always look so guilty when you see me.”

“I am guilty.”

“Sorry my being dead makes you uncomfortable. Think how it makes me feel.”

“I’ve never let that happen to anybody again,” said Jane. “He fooled me into taking him to the same person who had made your ID. I was stupid. I’m sorry.”

“What the hell.” Harry shrugged, and the coat seemed to rise and fall by itself. “Love is blind and deaf and ignorant and forgetful.”

“It wasn’t love.”

“You certainly went through all the motions. Does your husband know about John Felker?”

“He was long before Carey’s time. And you know there was no John Felker. That was just a name he made up to fool me and seduce me, and eventually, kill you and me. His name was Martin. James Michael Martin. Why are you here, Harry?”

“Because you need to be reminded.”

“Have I left something undone? Is there something I didn’t see or remember?”

“Is there something? Yes. Think about what happened to me, not what happened to you. Tonight you told Jimmy and Chelsea not to do what you did—jump into the sack with what amounts to a stranger.”

“Is that bad advice, Harry?”

“Not bad, just beside the point. What you should be remembering is what I consider the main event—my untimely death. The men who kicked down the door and killed everybody in my poker game were after Jerry Cappadocia. Mafia. The men who killed everybody, shot them through the head and chest, were hired by other guys in the Mafia.”

“Of course I remember that, Harry. How could I forget?”

“The nuggets of knowledge you should have taken home are the following. They didn’t mind killing six other human beings with Jerry. And it took five years for one of their hired killers, Felker—or Martin, as you prefer—to catch up with the seventh other human being, me. If it had taken five more years, they would have kept looking. If I were alive now, there would still be men out there waiting to cross me off their to-do list. They have what you might call a strong corporate memory.”

“Yes,” said Jane. “What I don’t know is why they’re involved in this at all. I’m almost certain that Daniel Crane killed Nick Bauermeister with the rifle that Walter Slawicky owned. I think he did it because he wanted Bauermeister’s girlfriend.”

“I’ve seen her. Plenty of guys would shoot somebody to get at that.”

“Lovely, Harry. But why would the Mafia care about a crime of passion? Why would they go looking for Jimmy?”

“Janie, Janie, Janie. Think the way they do. What do they spend most of their time doing?”

“Getting money. Extortion. Fixing games and races. Loaning money to people for huge interest. Pumping up the price of fake stocks and then dumping them. Hijacking trucks. Taking over legitimate businesses. Laundering money. Smuggling and selling drugs. Prostitution. Gambling. Murder for hire. Stealing—”